It's tricky because if you take the view that rightsholders licenses are necessary for training, it's not clear that the labels hold those rights. If you need the music producer rights, for instance, it's a lot more decentralized and harder to get a catalog.
Sign the letter and support Sam so you have a place at Microsoft if OpenAI tanks and have a place at OpenAI if it continues under Sam, or don’t sign and potentially lose your role at OpenAI if Sam stays and lose a bunch of money if Sam leaves and OpenAI fails.
Maybe they're working for both, but when push comes to shove they felt like they had no choice? In this economy, it's a little easier to tuck away your ideals in favor of a paycheck unfortunately.
Or maybe the mass signing was less about following the money and more about doing what they felt would force the OpenAI board to cave and bring Sam back, so they could all continue to work towards the missing at OpenAI?
> In this economy, it's a little easier to tuck away your ideals in favor of a paycheck unfortunately.
Its a gut check on morals/ethics for sure. I'm always pretty torn on the tipping point for empathising there in an industry like tech though, even more so for AI where all the money is today. Our industry is paid extremely well and anyone that wants to hold their personal ethics over money likely has plenty of opportunity to do so. In AI specifically, there would have easily been 800 jobs floating around for AI experts that chose to leave OpenAI because they preferred the for-profit approach.
At least how I see it, Sam coming back to OpenAI is OpenAI abandoning the original vision and leaning full into developing AGI for profit. Anyone that worked there for the original mission might as well leave now, they'll be throwing AI risk out the window almost entirely.
Perhaps a better example would be 95% of people voted in favour of reinstating apple pie to the menu after not receiving a coherent explanation for removing apple pie from the menu.
This is a bit of a limited view on how this clubbing goes down in practice. I'd even dare say it can on occasion work out just as well as therapy. The effect it has on how one experiences, feels, gets drawn into, the music is hard to describe, but for that experience alone it's not wasted in my opinion. Apart from that there's way more to 'clubbing' on MDMA than just being in the club. People more often than not go outside or to a quiet(er) space to just talk (easier on outdoor parties/festivals/warehouse-type raves etc but you get the piont). In fact this switching between partying and talking just makes the whole thing a lot better, the partying gives you a break of the deep conversations. The bonds formed with friends or strangers who become friends by shared thoughts there are pretty much for life.
Clubbing is its own therapy, as has been MDMA's use during it. It's a human ritual of shared empathetic expression that modern society attempted to "civilize" out of us. Chanting, rhythmic drumming, inducing an altered state of consciousness and dancing to firelight has been done for tens of thousands of years. It's as natural as the spring birds singing.
I'm not a club goer, but the people I know who do come back feeling energized and refreshed. They understand something about themselves that I don't, and I'll always envy that.
Based on what I've heard as well, couples that take it consensually and safely (by doing hours and hours of research on it), they seem draw closer to each other when they both do it.
It can be both, it can be beautiful in its own ways for both, I don't get why there is a need to say it's a waste in one instance, recreational drug use is not meant to be efficient, it's not meant to be "get the best out of the experience by doing this". It's fun in clubs, it's fun with a loved one on a quiet day, it's fun with close friends in an evening.
The real waste is trying to gatekeep experiences, or closing oneself to experiences because you deem there's just "one right way" to do it.
A similar source has told me that it’s not a waste at all in a music/dancing setting either. I would say it’s great if you want to get to and not away from somewhere.
I think my comment come of as too literal. It wasn't meant to imply that there is nothing of value to the club experience, but rather that a busy and loud environment like a club may over-highlight the stimulant aspects of the drug and tone down its more exceptional empathogenic traits, reportedly.
Couldn't disagree more (about it being wasted). It can definitely open your eye up to music you wouldn't have made yourself available to and let you enjoy it in ways you've never experienced.
Not wasted on raves at all. It’s an amazing experience out at a show. But it’s also equally amazing in a quieter environment with close friends / loved ones. It significantly increases empathy, allowing for opening up and connecting with others in a really special way
Dividends are silly in a world where you can achieve the same result and save everyone 20% tax by doing stock buybacks instead. It's also silly to strongly differentiate between dividend paying stocks and non dividend paying stocks as opposed to focusing on the business' cash flow, unless you're purposely avoiding dividend paying stocks because they suck from a tax perspective.
Yet, dividends are entrenched in many investor's psyche. Even official regulatory training in the US teaches registered representative that it's a good idea to recommend dividend bearing stocks to people who want "income" from their investments, which is a fallacy. Large mutual funds also have special categories for stocks providing high dividend yields.
Sad that this is the strategy as opposed to leveraging the incredible opportunity they have from their fabs.
Once upon a time dividend payments were _the reason_ to hold stock in companies. Funny that tax loop holes and the borrowing-against-assets-infinite-money-cheat rendered dividends "silly".
Yes this is a shit situation for Intel, but public companies should be paying dividends, IMO.
I have a feeling that increases in foreign investors also discouraged companies from issuing dividends. For example, I pay 0% capital gains tax but have to pay the US government (where I have never stepped foot) 30% on dividends.
Agreed. As a non-US tax resident, this factors a lot into whether a buy a stock or not. The 30% flat dividend tax rate pushes a lot of potentially enticing stocks to a bad buy for value.
I wonder whether this sentiment also contributed to the meme stocks popularity, since outside the US nobody really buys US stock with high dividends and are pushed to speculate on volatile stocks ala "stonks go up"..
In theory you can claim it back, but it's a major pain in the ass. Some ETF issued outside the US and holding US stocks will do it.
Other strategies to avoid this annoyance include:
1. selling on the ex-dividend date and buying the next day.
2. buying a long-date call and selling a put instead of holding the stock
3. simpler version of 2: buy a deep in the money long-dated call, you won't be paying all that much for the convexity, and you don't have to think about dividends.
I had to think about this for a bit, and then ended up Googling it. According to Investopedia [1] the key reasons buybacks are controversial are:
> Artificial financial results: The impact on earnings per share can give an artificial lift to the stock and mask financial problems revealed by a closer look at the company’s ratios.
> Abuse: Companies can use buybacks as a way to allow executives to take advantage of stock option programs while not diluting EPS. However, there isn't much evidence supporting the widespread belief that this happens.
> Price bumps: Buybacks can create a short-term bump in the stock price that some say allows insiders to profit while suckering other investors. This price increase may look good at first, but the positive effect is usually temporary, with equilibrium regaining when the market realizes that the company has done nothing to increase its actual value. Those who buy in after the bump can then lose money.
Basically there is a greater potential for price distortion and abuse with buybacks than dividends. Of course dividends can be gamed too, but as a relatively unsophisticated buy-and-hold investor I feel a lot more confident about buying a stock with a solid yield and long history of increasing dividends than I do about buying a stock with no yield whose valuation has shot up recently and is sitting near its record high.
1. There have been a studies that show companies are very good at doing buybacks near market highs rather than market lows so they are not efficient use of capital. Note that there have also been studies that try to claim stock buybacks do deliver long term value, but I have not found them convincing.
2. To build on the price bump point, the biggest beneficiary is actually short term activist investors and traders(who conveniently have similar time horizons as the executives) rather than long term shareholders.
3. Frequently buybacks are funded by draining reserves and/or with debt(especially when interest rates were low), this leaves companies weak when economic shocks happen like when the pandemic hit and we had to bail out the airlines who had no cash because they had been spending all their spare cash on buybacks. This could happen with dividends too but it is harder because it is an ongoing 'expense' you have to plan for because you pay it out every quarter rather than allow large sudden expenditures like you have with buybacks.
The reason to hold stock is that they return value to shareholders. Stock buy backs are functionally dividends but they are taxed more fairly. They also work better for foreign investors, and are a much cleaner and simpler mechanism than directly sending cash to shareholders.
Whoever is backing him is taking on the risk of SBF jumping bail (and I'd assume the house is under surveillance and he's wearing ankle monitors), in exchange for either silence or valuable goodwill on the tiny off-chance he gets out of this.
